A ChucksConnection TV Series Feature

Illya Woloshyn wears black high top Converse “Chuck Taylor” All Stars in the series.

The Odyssey

Flash, Jay, and Alpha wander through the “Downworld” seeking a way for Jay to return to the “Upworld”.

The Odyssey is a combination adventure and science fiction fantasy series about Jay Ziegler (Illya Woloshyn), an eleven-year-old kid living in British Columbia with his widowed mother, Val (Janet Hodgkinson). As the series opens, Jay is seen losing a chess game with his one true friend Donna Archipenko (Ashley Rogers) who is very smart, but crippled by polio in one leg. When she asks him what they should do next, Jay hesitates to answer, just as Keith Haldane (Tony Sampson), the leader of a local gang of kids that Jay is trying to get in with rides by on his bicycle. Keith asks Jay if he is coming by the tree fort later and makes fun of the two of them being together. After Keith leaves, Donna chides him, saying that all Keith wants to do is take away Jay’s antique telescope, (passed down to him by his father from his grandfather) and don’t expect her to save him when it happens. But Jay insists that he is just going to show it to the other kids and runs off to his house to get it. As Jay takes the telescope out of its wooden case, he looks at a picture of his father, and says “Sorry, dad.” Later after the telescope is brought and then taken by Keith and his gang as Donna predicted, she tells a dejected Jay, “Don’t get mad, get even.” While she creates a diversion, Jay circles around and climbs into the fort reclaiming the telescope, but he is spotted by Keith and his cronies. Jay tries to escape from them by grabbing onto a rope pulley on the side of the tree fort. Unfortunately the housing of the pulley breaks, causing Jay to fall precipitously to the ground and roll down the ravine, where he hits his head on some rocks, knocking him unconscious. The telescope falls also. Keith catches it, but fearing the consequences of what has happened throws the telescope into the nearby stream.

Jay and his friends seek assistance from Feelgood to get past the first checkpoint on their way to the tower.

The fall has caused Jay to go into a coma, which is symbolized
by Jay descending down into lower regions on a elevator. When
Jay exits the elevator, he is in another world, a Downworld society
that turns out to be a strange combination of Mad Max,
Kafka’s The Trial, the Wizard of Oz, and Orwell’s
Animal Farm. The world is populated exclusively by kids
who roam around in gangs and have no concept of the terms “home”
or “father” when Jay says them. Everything that goes
on in the Downworld is somehow based on artifacts or events from
Jay’s Upworld life. The Downworld is ruled by a 15-year-old teenager named
Brad, who looks exactly like Jay’s deceased father. When Jay sees
posters of him, he figures that Brad must know how he can return
to his home in the Upworld. Donna, now called Alpha, is no longer
crippled, and is there from Jay’s first steps in the Downworld
to help him find his way. Keith is now called Flash, and although
in the first episode he still bullies Jay by taking his telescope,
by the end of the activities in both the Upworld and Downworld,
Keith/Flash changes his mind about things. This is due in part
to Jay standing up to him and his remorse about what has happened
to Jay (again in both worlds). So Flash/Keith abandons his gang
and sets off to help Jay with his quest also. The telescope continues
to have great significance in many of the episodes. At the end
of the first episode, Jay is dunked in the water by one of Flash’s
gang members (played by the same kid who torments him in the Upworld).
Instead of swimming back up immediately, Jay swims up to a pool
at the edge of the Upworld where he briefly sees an apparition
of his mom. “Come home, now” she pleads, but Jay replies,
“No, I have to retrieve Dad’s telescope.” “Well,
watch out for weirdos,” she warns, mimicking the last words
she spoke to him before his fall from the tree. When Jay finally
does resurface in the Downworld, Flash returns the telescope right
after Jay is pulled out of the water. This corresponds to an operating
room crisis for Jay in the Upworld, where he is on the brink of
death, but then his condition suddenly stabilizes.

Jay tells the monitors that the telescope will solve the problem of the eclipse which has blacked out all sunlight in the Downworld.

Throughout the series, actions that happen in the Upworld are
mirrored and influenced by those in the Downworld, and vice versa.
The first season’s episodes are based on attempts by Jay to find
the checkpoints that will allow he and his companions to get to
the tower to see Brad. But to do this they must escape the pursuing
monitors and gangs of kids, some of whom are friendly, some who
want to use Jay for their own ends, and some who fear him because
of his talk about “big people” and other things that
they don’t understand. Meanwhile, in the Upworld, Jay’s condition
deteriorates due to a seizure and he is placed in intensive care.
Eventually things stabilize, but there is a long recovery period
ahead, and the hospital wants to place Jay in its extended care
ward, a dark and forbidding place where many comatose patients
are kept together. Val is upset by this, and decides to place
Jay in an expensive and experimental private care facility called
Driftwood, where she must spend many hours working with the staff
to try bring Jay back to reality. In the Downworld, Jay, Alpha,
and Flash finally get to the tower and find Brad, but he isn’t
Jay’s father, and doesn’t even control the tower anymore. The
second season begins with Jay discouraged about his lack of progress.
Even though he has briefly visited the Upworld, he hasn’t found
his home, and continues to wander the Downworld. Artifacts from
his Upworld existence keep appearing, and after Jay’s dad appears
as an actual character, first in the Downworld and then in the
Upworld, the overall plot direction begins to focus on what actually
happened to Jay’s dad, and how this has impacted Jay’s life. In
the last few episodes, Jay actually begins to emerge from his
coma, and his relationships with the people who appear in both
worlds causes Jay some real consternation, as he goes back and
forth between Upworld lucidity and the comatose state where he
is active in the Downworld.

Jay seeks information about the location of the last secret checkpoint from Frances X, a trader at the Brad Exchange, where items once belonging to Brad are sold and bartered.

The final season seems to be almost an after thought to the
series. You get the impression that the network probably decided
to renew the show at the last minute, and the writers were caught
in the dilemma of figuring out how to continue things. By now
the main characters are full grown teenagers, and bear little
resemblance to the adolescents appearing in season one. Jay is
now completely out of the coma, and the season deals with his
attempts to readjust to life in the real world. But this Jay has
a harder edge to him, and it is not clear why the fantasy world
of the Downworld is even maintained. He begins to see a psychiatrist
who tries to counsel him about the transisiton he is going through,
but Jay doesn’t trust him or any of the other male adults that
his mother associates with. This theme continues throughout the
season three episodes. A mostly unhappy Jay also has girl problems
as characters who appeared in his Downworld dreams are now actual
people in the Upworld. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, The
Odyssey is a remarkable series, given its genre as an adventure
show for kids. Even though it has a TV rating as acceptable for
seven-year-old kids, it is really more suitable for older kids of
middle school age. This is due to the violence and kids in peril
themes regularly presented in most of the episodes, but also because
only an older kid can begin to appreciate many of the complex
themes presented during the course of the series. The surreal
Downworld of The Odyssey introduces significant issues
of fascism, violence, and psychiatry, while exploring the impact
of dreams and many of the familiar coming of age themes we are
used to seeing in stories about adolescent kids. Series creators
Paul Vitols and Warren Easton are to be commended for their work
here. The program is well cast, and the principal actors Illya
Woloshyn, Ashley Rogers, Tony Sampson, Andrea Nemeth, and Janet
Hogkinson all deliver terrific performances. Despite its flaws,
viewers of all ages who like science fiction or psychological
drama will enjoy The Odyssey a lot, especially if they
can see it in sequence from the first season.

Flash, Jay and Alpha finally gain admittance into the region of the tower.

Best Chucks Scenes

During the first two seasons of The Odyssey, Jay is seen wearing black high top chucks in all of the Downworld scenes, and Upworld in the opening episode of the series. (After that he is mainly viewed in the Upworld comatose in a hospital bed). The best chucks shots occur during the frequently occurring chase sequences and scenes of peril where Jay is captured by various armies of kids, who are vying for control of the Downworld.

Trapped on a bridge by Finger’s and Scud’s troops, Jay fearfully stares down at his only escape—the river.

With the help of Flash and Alpha, Jay takes the plunge into the river.

Jay and Alpha run through the forest to escape from pursuing monitors.

Jay peers out of a tunnel to see if it is safe to continue running.

Barr orders Alpha and Jay taken to trial for crimes against Brad.

Scud’s troops tie and gag Jay then cart him away to the bridge to be bartered to Finger.

Jay watches helplessly from the cart while Scud and Finger negotiate his fate.

Captured later by Finger and his men, Jay is brought on a tree branch into the laboratory of the kid scientist Fractal to be lobotomized.

Do you know of other television shows or series where a main character wears Converse All Star Chuck Taylors? Can you describe a favorite episode or two from the series, or do you have additional information about the shows described here already? Do you have videotapes, DVDs or shot captures of episodes from any of the series that haven’t been given an in depth article on this site? If you do, email us at chucksphotos@chucksconnection.com and we will add the information to the television pages.